


Tear

by SenkoWakimarin



Series: Let Them Eat Flesh [9]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Billy Russo is a Horrible Human Being, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 00:28:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17193056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: There's no such thing as a fair fight.





	Tear

Frank’s blood on the floor is startlingly red.

He can’t stop looking at it. It’s spun in little gem-like beads on the hardwood, commas and dots, artistic evidence of violence. It’s his blood, and he is aware of that, but the knowledge holds very little emotion. Mostly, at this point, he’s just tired. Cold and tired.

Sometimes he thinks about dying. It’s always a hair's breadth away, right? He thinks about dying, how he wants to, how he refuses to. Who would care, who would be left behind; he has a grave anybody could visit any time; thinks it got more visitors while he was ‘dead’ than he ever got alive.

These are not the thoughts he should be having right now, he registers that. He can hear Bill tearing through the house, knows he should be after him. It’s just, he knows that what Bill wants isn’t here. No one’s home, just Frank.

Thank god for small favors, because what  Bill wants is to hurt someone. He knows the fastest way to hurt Frank is to hurt someone he cared about.

For a week straight he’s avoided the conversation that he’s known needed to be had with David. Worked overtime, slept odd hours, eaten alone. He’d thought they’d have time. He thought he could afford to sort the worst of it out on his own. Now his blood was on David’s floor, soaking into the wood, and he has once again brought death home to a family he’d never wanted to harm.

The cut on his face feels weird. Hot and thick, stiff. Blood slicks his cheek, over his jaw, dripping. Every time he moves, drops roll down from the edge of his jaw, splattering on the floor. Somehow, he’s more focused on that than he is on Bill, which is bad.

Picking himself up off the floor, he can hear Bill’s boots on the stairs, heading back towards him. He’d ambushed Frank in the kitchen -- the back door is off its hinges, busted. Frank wonders if this disconnect he’s feeling, this muddiness of his consciousness, is a concussion. Certainly his head hurts like it’s split open, the spot where Billy had struck him with the cutting board feeling massive, swollen. He knows he needs to get his head together, however much it hurts -- the daze is going to get him killed if he doesn’t -- but it’s so hard to focus.

He hasn’t eaten this week. It had been muddying his ability to think clearly for a few days now, and since he was avoiding David, he’d been cold most of the time, relying on the mechanical heat of the electric blanket to give him the thermal boost he needed.

The overall effect was this slow, uneasy mental state. He remembers how David had been last year, in the basement, in the cold. Remembers those eyes, so wide, so blue, staring at him as David clutched that knife, but so unwilling to do anything to hurt him. He remembers how he’d sit there for hours sometimes, staring at nothing. Eyes on the computer, uncomprehending. He’d thought it at least half an act; he understood now. Between the lack of suitable food and the loss of warmth, Frank’s mind was deteriorating at an accelerated rate… at the hospital they’d wanted him to sign up for medical testing, to see the effects of the mutation on a patient with the kind of traumatic brain injuries he’d sustained, but he’d refused.  

It’s hard, so hard, to focus. His head is ringing, and that makes him angry, but remaining focused on a threat that’s not physically in front of him is… difficult. He can hear Bill moving back through the house toward him -- something crashes in the dining room, shakes the wall with the force of something thrown. He’s on his feet, turning toward the noise, fists going up shakily.

A fist passes close enough to his face that he can feel the air move, jerking back just in time to avoid a new broken nose, and Bill barks something close to a laugh. He’s fucked up in ways far deeper than his rearranged face, but when he laughs, weirdly, he almost looks like himself. Even with that split in his lip, even with the weird uneven set of his cheekbones; when he laughs, there’s that old air of vicious vitality, that devil may care ferocity.

It’s easier facing Bill. With Billy in front of him, easy to see and easier to hit, he finds himself flooded with anger. It’s mindless, it’s blind; fury because Bill represents every slander and betrayal he’s ever faced and he wants to hurt Frank but he also wants to hurt David’s family -- _Frank’s_ family -- and he won’t allow that.

He holds his own for a minute, but he’s slow, slow when it counts, and Bill has always been more willing to fight dirty that he was. The air all rushes out of his lungs when Bill’s fist connects with his sternum, the knuckles of his gloved hands feeling like they might as well be metal-capped. Doesn’t help much that Billy is clad in a good deal of lightweight tactical gear and Frank’s in a tee shirt and jeans.

He hits the floor again, bouncing his head on the side of the cabinet on the way down, and Bill crouches over him, mocking in his disapproval.

“You look like shit, Frank,” he says, and hits him again when Frank opens his mouth to say something. “Lieberman’s wife not keeping you warm? She’s real pretty, I can see the appeal. Shame to kill someone that pretty. But I figure it’s like clearing an infestation, right? Can’t just kill the rats, you gotta get rid of everything they touched, right?”

Frank can’t say anything. His head is splitting, and when he opens his mouth again he feels like he might vomit, his vision whiting out for a moment, as if the light has gotten suddenly too bright to see through. He smells Bill’s sweat and the blood from his own wounds and something sharper, more sour, unpleasant and sick.

“Those cute kids, that nice woman? You and Lieberman are the rats, and you’ve spoiled this family. Let them out in the world and they’ll carry on this bullshit live-and-let-live mentality. Well, maybe it’s die-and-let-live. I’m not sure how you zombies wanna look at it.”

Swiping at Bill, Frank feels his heart sink when his arm is easily knocked aside. He’s not out of shape -- the construction job had seen well enough to keeping him it -- but between the injuries and the effects of the unfed mutation, he’s just not fast enough. Billy catches his arm at the wrist, shaking his head, looking almost sorry.

“Look what it’s done to you. It’s almost sad, Frank, really, trully. I can’t believe you let this happen to yourself. You think Maria would want you dragging yourself around, a fucking corpse crawling home to her? It’s sick, Frank; you’re sick.”

“You talk too fucking much, Bill,” Frank grinds out, voice low and wavering with the effort it takes not to choke on his own rising gorge. “Ambush. Fair fight, you’d be dead already.”

Bill smiles, that smile that changes his whole fucked-up face back to some semblance of who he used to be. “Maybe, Frankie, but I got some friends who need your buddy Lieberman dead. He still your buddy? I know you’re short on those.”

With frustrating smugness, Bill pushes himself to his feet. “Tell you what, Frankie. Go ahead, stand up. Let’s do this fair. For old times sake, huh? Get up, c’mon.”

It’s not like to be a fair fight, whatever Billy says. Bill won’t take the body armor off and Frank doesn’t have any stashed where he could grab it. Bill has a combat knife and a gun in a shoulder holster, another at his hip. If Frank had to guess, he’s say there was another strapped at the small of his back, and probably a second knife on him somewhere.

Worse, Bill seems perfectly healthy. Months in a coma mean shit when the hospital cares to take care of the patient, and they had. He was a little thin, but his punches hit as hard as ever. Frank, having gone without the food his body required for a week now, was slow and already injured from Bill’s ambush. There’s no fucking contest, not really, but Frank’s not just going to lay here and let the bastard have it easy.

Getting up fast makes his head swim, his stomach cramp with the urge to puke, and he gags even as he launches himself at the other man, giving Bill no time to reach for any of his weapons. The only way to make this even remotely fair is to keep Bill surprised, not let his brain slide into that horrible hyperfocus on fine details -- his blood on the floor, the dent in the dining room wall where Bill threw a chair into it.

He can feel his mind trying to do that, trying to latch on to sights or sounds or smells -- he feels like he can smell everything, the sweat and blood and the polish of the floor from David cleaning yesterday -- and he focuses instead on the sensations, the motions of the fight. It’s always been a visceral thing, the fight while he’s in it. He can never remember the details later, not of any real fight; he remembers ugly sensory things; the splatter of blood on his cheek, the kick of a rifle into his shoulder, the heat, his jaw aching from clenching his teeth. No real detail, no faces.

Better that way, he thinks, twisting away from a fist swung at his face again. He’s picking up on Bill’s fixation with hitting him about the head, especially the face, knows he can use it as a weakness if he can just gain a little ground. But with a jerk of his arm there’s a knife coming from Bill’s wrist and Frank’s ducking back to avoid the blade.

The scream that leaves him when the knife tears through his shirt and into his side is ugly; he tries to step back and his feet catch on the rug, his heart rate up to an almost healthy level as he goes down, grabbing Billy by one leg and yanking him down with him. They grapple, and Frank understands with sudden, ugly clarity, that he’s not going to come away from this. Bill is hot against him, and he loathes that heat, wants to scramble away from it as Billy settles on top of him, straddling his stomach and hitting his face again and again while Frank tries to get a hold on his throat.

It’s happening so fast, too fast, and his sluggish, cold mind, refuses to keep up. He hears the crack of his nose breaking and feels nothing for a few long seconds, before his whole head seems to explode in fresh pain. Hot, sharp, agonizing pain, bursting from the center of his face and echoing around his skull, and he’s shouting, low and without words, trying to get out from under Bill and finding himself trapped, unwilling to stop even as he knows, he know he can’t win this.

He has to win, because if he doesn’t, it’s his _family_ in danger and he _can’t_ , he cannot let any of them be hurt, not again, not again.

“I made you a promise,” Billy says, triumphant, face bloody, hands bloodier, grinning as he sits back, reaching for the gun holstered under his arm. “In that basement, with Rawlins? I promised it would be me and I’m guh --”

Heat splatters over Frank’s face, hot, wet, stinging. His mouth is open and he tastes blood, thinks it must be his own until he registers the great gorey hole where Bill’s left eye had been, the echoing bang of a gunshot, the way Bill’s gone stiff, his grin more rictus now that revel. Bill topples onto Frank, dead weight, and it feels like slow motion but it’s not, it’s still so much so fast.

“Frank, are you -- shit, Frank,” and Frank’s heart is starting slow, starting to even out because whether he wants to puke or not -- his mouth is full of Bill’s blood and whatever all else had flown in when the gun went off -- that’s David’s voice, that’s David standing there, gun still held in front, two handed to dead with the kick put out by that stupid, ‘just for show’ P250 Frank had last seen in the basement he’d nearly died in.

Shoving the corpse off him, wincing at the tangle Bill lays in, Frank tries to focus on the touch of David’s hand to his, the strength David put into pulling him up. David’s hand is cool, but there’s a sort of slow warmth in the way he throws himself against Frank, unmindful of the blood slicking his face, his side, unknowing or uncaring of the ache in his head and he clutches to him, hard, scared. Terrified, the way he had been every time he’d seen Frank hurt.

“S’okay,” he says, and David’s tears on his shoulder feel like acid, but it burns good, better than the heat on his side where the blood is sticking his shirt to his skin. “It’s fine, you’re good.”

He’s shaking, shaking like he’s going to come apart, but he leans on Frank, still clutching the gun in one hand. “You’re okay, you’re… fuck, Frank.”

Frank recognizes the shaking, the body trying to throw off the surge of endorphins and chemicals that ran through a man in combat situations. David’s never been here before, and Frank knows how bad he’d wanted to reach for someone his first time.

They cling to each other there, in the middle of the house, each unwilling to let the other go. They cling, and Frank feels David’s tears eating a hole in his skin, the idea of having hurt him eating a hole in his heart.


End file.
